A Town Plagued by Water

Water has not been kind to Toms River. When I drove through the coastal New Jersey town, in early May, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy was still visible along the strip that sits on a barrier peninsula facing the ocean: houses had been tossed into the sand like toys; buildings had walls sheared away; and a field of debris looked like a graveyard.

Most of Toms River sits on the mainland, but its main attraction is Ortley Beach, on the peninsula. To the south is Seaside Heights, made famous by the sybaritic exploits of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” In the other direction are Lavallette and Mantoloking, with their saltbox cottages evoking the serenity of Cape Cod on a good day.

It was not a good day when I visited. It should have been a bright spring afternoon; instead a cold rain fell from a pavement-colored sky. It had been more than six months since Sandy, yet construction crews looked to be in the earlier stages of recovery. Among the most memorable images of the storm is that of Casino Pier looking like it had been snapped apart by a child, its roller coaster washed out into the ocean. Demolition of that ride began last week. The new coaster will be called the “Super Storm.”

Waterborne destruction has visited Toms River before, albeit via less conspicuous channels, which Dan Fagin traces with marvelous precision in his new book, “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation.” For more than forty years, its residents ingested trichloroethylene, styrene-acrylonitrile (SAN) trimer, epichlorohydrin, benzidine, and naphthalene. These are poisons known or suspected to cause cancer. Some are the by-products of dye-making; trichloroethylene is an industrial solvent; SAN trimer forms during the production of plastics. Regardless of these chemicals’ origins, their presence in the air and the aquifer used by the Toms River Water Company led to Toms River being designated a residential cancer cluster. Specifically, far too many children there became sick from acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Cancer is prevalent and prolific: there are more than a hundred and fifty types of the disease. The complexity makes causation difficult to prove within a community where every genetic and lifestyle factor cannot possibly be taken into account.

Accordingly, the very few confirmed cases of residential cancer clusters have achieved macabre fame. One is in Woburn, Massachusetts, which also had trichloroethylene in its drinking-water wells. In 1996, Jonathan Harr published “A Civil Action,” about Jan Schlichtmann, a crusading lawyer who fought on behalf of the families of children stricken, as in Toms River, with acute lymphocytic leukemia. (One of the companies settled the suit for eight million dollars; Schlichtmann bypassed the chance to settle for far more.)

Toms River is not famous. Fagin’s book is necessary, but that doesn’t mean it is welcomed, especially by those who find in forgetting a curative property. When I talked to the mayor, Thomas F. Kelaher, he was far more concerned about Sandy cleanup than childhood cancer. The latter was “history,” he said, displeased that I had brought up the topic. “Nobody talks about that anymore.”

The town is pleasantly unexceptional. Along Cardinal Drive, midcentury split-levels show signs of upkeep and suburban prosperity. Only by driving slowly could you have seen a chain-link fence behind the houses. That fence circumscribes fourteen hundred acres of land, where the Swiss company Ciba once ran a dye-manufacturing plant, the Toms River Chemical Corporation, which opened in 1952.

The reactions needed to make dyes require or produce volatile, toxic compounds; secretaries who ventured into production buildings complained of melted stockings. After the necessary reactions ran their course, the waste simply flowed into Toms River. Fagin describes how George Woolley, later a worker at the chemical plant, came home from college, in 1962, and took dip in a swimming hole, only to discover “a purplish foam clinging to his body.” In 1966, Ciba built a pipeline to the ocean, where, for the next three decades, it continued to dump waste just three thousand feet from Ortley Beach. When the underground pipeline burst, in 1984, and sludge spilled out at an intersection in town, an official for Ciba-Geigy (the name of the company after a 1970 merger) said the waste was “ninety-nine percent water and a little salt.”

No pipeline could dispose of all the by-products generated by the plant: a single pound of finished anthraquinone vat dye left behind a thousand gallons of wastewater. Much of the plant’s chemical refuse was put into fifty-five-gallon drums, which, Fagin writes, “proliferated like a pox.” There would eventually be forty-seven thousand such drums on the Ciba-Geigy site, “buried in pits and trenches or just dumped in unmarked clearings within the dense forest. Often, the waste would not be contained at all.” It was poured into holes with names like “the Acid Pits.” The town’s Republican leadership took corporate mandarins at their word: that this “pure” effluent was “harmless to fish life.”

Three miles from the town center is Toms River’s other Superfund site—one of nine in Ocean County—more, Fagin notes, than in thirty-six states. Here stood the egg farm of Samuel and Bertha Reich, Holocaust survivors who bought this land in 1952. Egg farming did not prove propitious; the advent of long-haul refrigerated trucking, in the nineteen-sixties, put the Reichs out of business. Their supposed savior turned out to be the town’s doom: Nick Fernicola, a garbage hauler who had run out of places to stash waste produced by Union Carbide. For a promised forty dollars a month (never paid), the Reichs allowed Fernicola to store his barrels on the farm in the fall of 1971.

Fagin describes Fernicola’s trucks turning Reich Farm into a “toxic dump” where “thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals splashed directly onto the farm’s sandy soil, with no barrier to prevent them from seeping down through the sand and into the groundwater that flowed beneath.” Fernicola—who has since died—only abused the Reichs’ land for four months. But that was long enough. Among the more Solomonic questions in “Toms River” is whether the Reichs bear responsibility for abetting Fernicola, who got off with a hundred-dollar fine. They plead innocence, or at least ignorance: when I talked to Bertha over the phone recently, she told me in a despairing voice, “He knew. We didn’t.” I pressed for more, but she grew wary and mentioned needing to consult her lawyer. The Reichs still own the farm. They tried to sell it, but no one wanted the poisoned land.

Caught between the pincers of Ciba-Geigy and Reich Farm, residents of Toms River continued to drink water full of mutagenic chemicals, which can damage DNA and potentially lead to cancer. The tainted water (and air) was especially dangerous to pregnant women, since fetuses, with their rapidly dividing cells, are highly susceptible to cancer-causing invaders.

Indeed, what makes Fagin’s book so terrifying is that most of its victims are children: Gabrielle Pascarella died at all of fourteen months from a rare melanoma that invaded her central nervous system; Randy Lynnworth grew up in the shadow of the chemical plant on Cardinal Drive, and succumbed to a brain tumor at eighteen. Even those who survived, like Michael Anderson, who contracted leukemia at age ten, were robbed of their childhoods by a disease that is not supposed to strike, on average, until the age of sixty-seven.

We sometimes think of cancer as a sin tax, the product of too much smoking, not enough kale. As Siddhartha Mukherjee notes in “The Emperor of All Maladies,” cancer is “the pathology of excess.” And though our consumption continues apace, the processes that fuel it have conveniently disappeared from view. If Toms River is no longer plagued by dye manufacturing, that is because so much clothing is now made in China. Fagin arrives, at the end of his book, at the Chongqing Children’s Hospital, where a woman watches her nine-year-old son suffer from leukemia, which knows no distinction between Guangdong and New Jersey.

The hero of “Toms River” is surely Linda Gillick, whose son, Michael, was born in 1979 with neuroblastoma, but defied odds that had him dead within months. He still lives, though his growth is stunted and cancer continues to hound him. Gillick marshalled the families of Toms River to demand the state and federal governments to study their water supply. The more attention the suspected cancer cluster got, the larger the stain on Toms River’s reputation grew. “The water is fine,” one anonymous note chided her. “Cancer cluster is probably a freak. Meantime, Ocean County will suffer this summer because you have scared away tourists, homebuyers and others.” When I spoke to Gillick, she said, “Companies slip; government slips.” But “slip” is a generous way to describe the wrongs committed against Toms River.

Ciba-Geigy, the Dow Chemical Company (which had acquired Union Carbide), and United Water Toms River (previously Toms River Water Company) were not going to budge a legal inch unless there was proof that their activities had caused cancer. That task fell, in good part, to Jerald Fagliano, an epidemiologist at the New Jersey health department, who conducted case-control studies scrutinizing residents’ habits—everything from tap-water drinking to hot-dog consumption—while also analyzing historical water distribution patterns. In 2001, Fagliano issued a narrow but confident ruling regarding the sixty-nine families whose children had fallen ill with cancer: consumption of town tap water was responsible for an increased incidence of leukemia in girls under five. This did not satisfy many families, but it was enough for the companies in question to settle for a sum that Fagin estimates to have been as high as forty million dollars, with some families receiving as much as around half a million dollars.

The lawyer who helped broker the settlement was the same Jan Schlichtmann from Woburn. When I asked Schlichtmann whether justice was served in Toms River, he said, “Absolutely”—even though none of the companies admitted liability. At least, Fagin writes, Toms River can claim that its water has been “tested more thoroughly than anywhere in New Jersey—maybe anywhere in the world.” As for Ciba-Geigy, its pharmaceutical arm morphed into Novartis, which makes drugs to cure some of the cancers its predecessor may have once caused.

It’s somewhat odd that Fagin’s book has come out now, a reminder of one misfortune as Toms River is dealing with another. The cancer was caused by human activity; as for the hurricane, Bloomberg Businessweek put it best with its post-Sandy cover, whose headline announced, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

The beach season opens this weekend, but many of the beaches along the Jersey Shore have not recovered from the hurricane. It will take time, but the sunbathers will return; teen-agers will eat clam strips on the boardwalk; children will coax parents to ride the roller coaster. And eventually people will forget Sandy, as some in Toms River have already forgotten cancer.